


How Much Did We Lose to Live This Way?

by nonisland



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Chapter 11: Throne of Knowledge (Fire Emblem), Devotion, Female My Unit | Byleth, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Church Route, Gen, Gen or Pre-Ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:28:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26364193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: Edelgard had never expected Professor Byleth to join her war. Really. She hadn’t.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	How Much Did We Lose to Live This Way?

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I think about how very displeased Hubert is with Byleth in the Battle of Garreg Mach in Silver Snow and I cry about it. Title is from Vienna Teng’s [“Antebellum”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noPDuWMCyoQ), which just really feels like the Silver Snow mood to me. Thanks to Scott for looking this over; any remaining errors are mine.
> 
> * * *

“Well, here we are,” Lady Edelgard says quietly. Her steps as she moves through the echoing halls of the outpost they have set up camp in are brisk and sure, her shoulders squared and ready.

Hubert has known her since he was six years old, and he is hardly fooled. Her voice is almost never this soft, and never with happiness. One day he hopes it can be, but this is not yet that new world. What he can say, though, he has no idea. For the first time he wishes he had any skill at offering comfort. “What orders do you have for me, Lady Edelgard?”

“Orders?” Lady Edelgard turns to stare at him. In the shadows of the outpost her eyes are wide night-colored pools against the flawless pallor of her face. She still wears the Flame Emperor’s armor, and the frill of dark feathers bursting around her makes her even whiter in the gloom, more like a lost spirit than a girl. He would do anything never to see her like this again. “No, this is… Of course we couldn’t have expected the professor to do anything else. I thought…well, I thought we were alike, she and I. I saw myself in her. But she has a gift with people, in spite of her aloofness, that I know I lack. Of course our former classmates chose to follow her.”

There is no _of course_ about it. If the eternal flames are real, and not a myth made to coerce unthinking obedience from the church’s victims, Lady Edelgard’s path might take her there in the end, and if it does Hubert will carve it even there for her, in the hopes that the flames will content themselves with him, and spare her in his wake.

“It would have been foolish,” she says, voice wobbling a little as Hubert has not heard it do in years before she masters it again, “of me to have expected otherwise. I wouldn’t gamble our success and your safety by planning for something that could never happen. My orders are the same as before.”

She has laid so many grand and glorious plans. She _believes_ , as Hubert does not, in a shining new Fódlan, prosperous and at peace.

He believes in _her_ , but he has seen a great deal of ugliness so that she need never trouble herself with it; he thinks, perhaps, that greed and violence, ambition and selfishness, will not be as easy to destroy as the Church of Seiros, or even those who slither in the dark. They make convenient strings for him to pull, but he suspects that he will not be the only one still caught in his past when they realize her dream. But that is hardly her failing. That he sees the worst of the world is an ugliness second only to that he is _part_ of it.

Lady Edelgard dreams. She sees the path shining scarlet before her, and he has put himself to such pains never to let her trouble herself over the details of its coloring, or question whether it will continue on, smooth and even, to the horizon.

“If there is anything, Lady Edelgard…” Hubert says helplessly. The professor _will_ pay for this, he will make sure of that, but she is not here now, and Lady Edelgard is. “Anything at all.”

“…I would like this armor off,” she says, her eyes fluttering closed for just a moment before they open again.

That, Hubert can do. He unhooks the cloak from her spaulders, then starts on her gauntlets. Her hands are bare beneath the leather, thin and pale. The nails are bitten down to the quick. It feels like an intrusion seeing her this way; she should not be that way at all. He gets her spaulders off, ungainly with their fans of blood-red feathers, and then her vambraces.

Then he stops and fetches her gloves.

“Thank you,” Lady Edelgard says quietly, and pulls them on, covering up the new rawness of her fingertips and the old manacle scars at her wrists both. She clears her throat. “Metodey’s death was convenient. The professor may yet be of some use after all, before we defeat her.”

Her voice is stronger now. She will move forward now, and Hubert will carry this too for her.

**Author's Note:**

> Armor removal sequence taken from [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k24y_ZmxRHg), even though the armor he’s wearing is not as fancy as the Flame Emperor’s.


End file.
